Integrate 2018 summary day 3

Yet another fabulous day here at integrate 2018. We started a bit earlier this day and that is something everyone was glad for, otherwise we most likely would have missed our flight back to Stockholm.

Let’s get started by talking about the last session. Our very own MVP, Mattias Lögdberg, finished of the conference with a splendid session that glued together what have been presented the previous days. He did that with the help of a pen, no demos and the work that our client have trusted us to implement. Great work!!
It was a pure pleasure seeing our colleague take the stage. The audience where dropping jaws. Some might say we are bias in our glorification but the twitter-flow isn’t. Nice work Mattias. Happy to be working with you.

So, what did the day start off with? Well, Richard Seroter had the first session called “Architecting Highly Available Cloud Integrations”. This was very interesting and well executed, unfortunately the cameraman where not as prepared as Richard.
Some of the things he had on the agenda was

Here we have lots to choose from. Sql Server (always-on), CosmosDB (e.g. geo-redundancy), Service Bus and Event Hub using these is being true to the 24/7/365. Logic apps (High Availability by design). Functions (depending on service plan it too can be H/A by design)

Only integrate with H/A services (where possible). Document and understand what services that failover together, meaning a process contains services if one service fails the whole process fails.

The second runner up this day was Michael Stephenson and how Flow can empower DevOps. He had the coolest demo of all.
DevOps becomes a lot more interesting when you can do it through MindCraft.
Talk about solving mundane tasks in a fun way. What we took with us from this session was how powerful Flow and Power-Apps can be. Together they will change devops and how our customers look upon us as integrators.
One can do some seriously good and cool stuff, with-out being UX-developer.

After this our bugs-friend Johan Hedberg had a session about “Using VSTS to deploy to Biztalk Server”.
Again, a fantastic session, very informative and an eye-opener for many in the audience. Anyone having thoughts around ALM and BizTalk, and have a “bug-free”version of FP2 (i.e. must include CU 4) will most likely benefit from using the new template regarding deployment of biztalk artefacts and if you are familiar with deployment of web apps you will be very familiar with this process.

A big thanks to the Integrate organizers for inserting a break after these three splendid sessions.

When the break was over Wagner Silveira entered the stage with how one can expose biztalk to the world and why one might want to do it. Again we got a session with smashing demos that just worked. He showed us how “easy” it is to expose biztalk server in all its glory to the world in a professional way.

After this session, Dan Toomey took over and showed us the anatomy of an enterprise integration architecture. He gave everyone some food for thought. Just check out these bullet points.

Make sure your System Of Record layer is solid (e.g. well definied APIs, extensible, enforcing security and data validation)

Limit customizations within the System Of Record (e.g. keep the ERP to be just that)

Consider the use of canonical schemas (believe it or not it can be very handy)

Low coupling and strong cohesion (does this sound familiar to anyone working with code?). That means basically use pub/sub patterns where applicable.

The most important one – Allow room for innovation! Encourage and build platforms for experimentation.

The next runner up was Toon Vanhoutte and he showed us how to “Unlock the power of hybrid integration with Biztalk and webhooks!”. Yet again we are delivered smashing demos. Webhooks are cool! Everybody should be using webhooks. It is kind of pub/sub-by-design. It is like putting a reminder in your calendar and when triggered you can take action. Much better then polling.

But there are things to consider before jumping in.

The conference ended for us with Mattias Lögdbergs session “Refining Biztalk implementations” (we had a flight to catch). As mentioned in beginning his session glued all the pieces, given the previous days, together. He proved that the “pen” it is mightier than the demo 😊

Through his session we got to see that what we are doing together with our clients is the path to go if one wants to stay ahead of the competition.

After Mattias final words we had to rush to make it to Gatwick, so we missed the roundtable discussions with Microsoft

Amazing to see such excellent work and how much preparations the speakers have put in just for us. It was a pure joy and pleasure to be part of this conference. We feel very privileged and hope to be part of Integrate 2019.